The Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead

 

Characters
Carney family	Criminals	Others
Ray Carney Elizabeth – wife May and John – children   Freddie – Ray’s cousin, kept getting Ray into trouble   Aunt Millie – Freddie’s mother, raised Ray after father left   Mike Carney – Ray’s father   Alma and Leland Jones – Elizabeth’s parents	Miami Joe Arthur – safe-cracker Pepper Freddie   Chink Montague – collected money for protection   Detective Munson – collected payoffs   Harvey Moskovitz, jeweler, fence   Thomas Andrew Bruce “Cheap Brucie”   Biz Dixon – drug dealer, Carney had to take care of him before Duke   Linus Van Wyck – died of overdose	Rusty – furniture store clerk   Dumas Club: Leland Jones Terrance Pierce – lawyer Franklin D. Shepard – lawyer Wilfred Duke – took $500 bribe for Ray’s membership and then he was declined   Marie – secretary at store   “Duke job” Pepper Miss Laura - prostitute Tommy Lips – surveillance Zippo - photographer

 

For Discussion:

NOTE: Page numbers are from hardback edition.

1.       Wherever Carney went, he described and evaluated the furniture.  For example, when he went to Miss Laura’s apartment he saw “A Burlington Hall four-poster bed with tasseled mauve curtains dominated the living room, centered on a Heriz rug of lush crimson” (page 161).  Did the furniture descriptions add to your enjoyment of the book?  Did they give you any insight into Carney’s character?

2.       In Carney’s accounting class the professor, Professor Simonov, told the class that “until the advent of the light bulb, it was common to sleep in two shifts” with the break in between called the “dorvay” (page 135).  He said “it was a respite from the normal world and its demands, a hollow of private enterprise carved out of lost hours” (page 135).  What did you think about this idea?

3.       In the beginning, did Carney think he was doing anything wrong?  Early on he described the activity as a “natural flow of goods in and out and through people’s lives, from here to there, a churn of property, and Ray Carney facilitated that churn.  As a middleman.  Legit” (page 25).  Where did he actually cross the line to crime?  Could he have turned back at any point?

4.       Elizabeth’s parents thought that she had “settled” when she married Carney.  Do you think this knowledge influenced Ray and his decisions?

5.       On page 202 we read that after the pictures were published in the newspaper, Duke left town with all the money people had invested in the new bank.  Was the plan for revenge against Duke worth all the problems it caused the rest of the community? 

6.       Did the act of revenge lower Carney to Duke’s level?  Was that worth it?

7.       At the end of the novel, Carney thought about how the neighborhood was devastated by the building of the World Trade Center compared to the lesser devastation of the riots.   What did you think about this comparison?

8.       Also at the end, Carney and his family were moving to Strivers’ Row, a more affluent neighborhood.  Why did he keep fencing stolen property if things were going well financially?

9.       How would you categorize this book: crime novel, addressing racial issues, literary fiction, or something else?

10.   Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize two years in a row for his two previous books, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys.  If you read those books, how did this one compare?   Why was it not on the best seller lists as long as the previous two?

The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides

 

Characters
Alicia Bereson	Theo Farber Forensic psychotherapist	The Grove
Vernon – father, suicide Eva – mother, killed in car accident   Gabriel – husband   Max – Gabriel’s brother, lawyer Tanya – secretary, fiancé   “Alcestis” – painting Alicia did after Gabriel’s death   Lydia Rose – Alicia’s aunt, raised her after mother’s death Paul Rose – son   Jean-Felix Martin - gallerist	Father - abusive   Kathryn – Theo’s wife   Ruth – Theo’s counselor	Staff Lazarus Diomedes – professor, forensic psychiatry Stephanie Clarke – manager Christian West – psychiatrist, at university with Gabriel Rowena Hart – art therapist Indira Yuri   Patients Alicia Elif

 

For Discussion:

NOTE: All page numbers are from the hardback edition.

1.       On page 57 Alicia wrote that if she painted with a plan, nothing worked.  But “if I’m really paying attention, really aware, I sometimes hear a whispering voice pointing me in the right direction.  And if I give in to it, as an act of faith, it leads me somewhere unexpected.”   Do you think this is a good description of how are happens?

2.       As you were reading, what were you predicting would be the ending?

3.       Discuss Theo’s marriage with Kathy.  On page 102 Ruth suggested he chose Kathy “to prove that my father was correct – that I’m worthless and unlovable.”

4.       In the same vein, Alicia overheard her father, Vernon, say after Eva died in the accident, “Why did it have to be her?  Why didn’t Alicia die instead?” (page 255).  How do you think this affected Alicia?

5.       Both Theo and Alicia felt unloved by their parents.  How did this play into their separate and joint stories?

6.       When Theo was talking to Alicia, he said “We leak all kinds of information about ourselves unintentionally – by the color of my socks, or how I sit or the way I talk” (page 92).  What things do you look at in other people and then make judgements, intended or not, about that person.   What do you think about you conveys who you are?

7.       What did you think about Max, Gabriel’s brother?  In chapter thirteen of Alicia’s diary Max told her that he loved her (page 123).  Alicia then wrote, “I don’t believe that Max is in love with me.  I believe he hates Gabriel, that’s all” (page 124).  

8.       Why did Theo go to the Grove and treat Alicia when he didn’t want her to recover and tell what really happened? 

9.       In Alicia’s diary, Theo read that Christian had been treating her privately before Gabriel’s murder.  Why do you think Christian never told that to anyone at The Grove?

10.   What did you think of the ending?  Were you surprised?  Was it realistic?

11.   Would you recommend this book to a friend?

12.   In the acknowledgements of his second book, The Maidens, the author paid homage to the great female mystery writers including Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James and others.  How well did this novel compare to the classics?

The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

 

Characters
The Dutch House	Others
Mr. and Mrs. VanHoebeek   Cyril Conroy Elna – first wife, mother Maeve Danny   Sandy – housekeeper Jocelyn – cook Fiona “Fluffy” – nanny   Andrea Smith – second wife Norma – pediatric oncologist Bernice “Bright” – yoga instructor	Celeste – married Danny Kevin Maeve “May”   Mrs. Buchsbaum – neighbor   Lawyer Gooch   Mr.  Otterson – Otterson’s Frozen Vegetables   Dr. Maurice Able – chemistry professor Alice- wife Nell - daughter

For Discussion:

NOTE: All page numbers are from hardback edition.

1.       Discuss Elna.   She gave up everything to serve the poor.  Was that admirable?  Fair to her family?   Could she have found a happy medium?   According to Fluffy, she “has a higher calling than we do, that’s all” (page 201).  Does that justify her actions?

 

2.       Elna had just entered a convent when Cyril came and took her home.   Should she have stayed there?

 

3.       Maeve and Danny keep going back to park in front of the Dutch House.  Fluffy said she did the same thing.  Why did they do that?

 

4.       What did you think about the Dutch House? Why did it engender such strong emotions, positive and negative, in people?  Would you want to live there?

 

5.       Why did Cyril marry Andrea?  Jocelyn said, “Your father thought that house was the most beautiful thing in the world and he found himself a woman who agreed” (page 110).

 

6.       Why did Maeve and Danny not like Andrea?  Were they justified in their feelings?   Danny thought, “The truth is I have plenty of memories of her being perfectly decent.  I just choose to dwell on the ones in which she wasn’t” (page 73).

 

7.       Could all the problems have been avoided if someone had thought to tell Andrea that Cyril had died?  Would this have stopped her from kicking Danny out?

 

8.       How much of the relationship between Andrea and Cyril’s children was his fault?  On page 77, when Danny was telling about Cyril staying away from the house, he thought, “it also seemed pretty clear he had married the wrong woman.” 

 

9.       Given his relationship with Andrea, why didn’t Cyril protect Maeve and Danny more in his will?

 

10.   When Maeve was away at college, Andrea gave her bedroom to Norma, but no one told Maeve until she came home.  Both Maeve and Norma remembered this event all their lives.  Did you think Norma wanted the room?  What did that action signify?

 

11.   In this same vein, why didn’t Cyril pay more attention to his own children?  Maeve rented an apartment on her own, not in a building Cyril owned, and he never noticed what she had done or asked about school.  Danny said, “The only thing my father ever saw in my sister was her posture” (page 109).

12.   The only reason Danny went to boarding school and then became a doctor was because those were the most expensive educational options.   Why did Maeve force him to do this?  Were you surprised he went along with these plans? 

 

13.   Danny did the same thing as his father – buying his wife a house without asking her opinion.  He thought it “had been one of the few truly romantic gestures I’d even made” (page 324).   Also, he did not know Celeste would have liked shelf runners like he was installing for Maeve (page 294). Why was he so oblivious to his wife’s wishes? 

 

14.   What did you think about the references to basketball?  Two different times Danny mentioned what he had learned from basketball.  The first was in the train station when basketball “had taught me how to move through a crowd” (page 127). The second was that during surgery he was “as conscientious as anyone else in my class but twice as fast, which just goes to show that basketball had served me well” (page 162).

 

15.   Discuss Celeste and her relationship with Maeve.  When they first met, Maeve and Celeste like each other.  What happened?  Danny thought that Celeste “gave her best effort to everything but still, her big wandering brain was underutilized, and would often turn itself against my sister” (page 224).  He also thought that their dislike for each other “was a habit” (page 239) and that if they had met without him, they would have liked each other.   Was there any way to repair this?

 

16.   When Elna visited Maeve in the hospital, Maeve was happy but Danny was angry.  Could you understand each of these reactions?   If Elna was in New York for years, why didn’t she contact her children?

 

17.   Were you able to follow all of the time changes in the storyline?   How well did the author signal these changes?

 

18.   Did you like the ending?  Why or why not?